Category Archives: Web Hack

Domain Names International (InTrust Domains, DNIDomainMarket.com) has been repeatedly spamming me with emails about domains similar to ones I own. The emails come from various random domains, but when going to the domain, you are immediately redirected to dnidomainmarket.com. On the home page of their website they advertise how the BBB says they can be trusted. This general shadiness makes me not want to follow the opt out link. Also googling makes it fairly obvious that the optout will not work anyway.

I would really suggest that others receiving this spam, click the link below to the BBB and file another advertising complaint against the company. Also reporting to spam cop or similar places.

One of our many wordpresses was not allowing you to crop images. I tracked this down to the image failing to load which in turn was caused by an extra \r\n preceding the image content. This extra line-break is caused when an included php file ends in ?>\r\n. Because php writes any content outside of a php tag to the output stream, this causes an extra newline to precede any other content you might have been trying to send (such as a jpeg image). This can cause all sorts of problems, in this case corrupting the JPEG output.

To fix this problem I investigated how to get grep to search in multiline mode (install pcregrep). I then had the trouble that $ matches end of line rather than end of file. After some googling I found that \z will match end of file, and with that I was off to the races. This pcregrep expression will allow you to find php files with pesky trailing space issues.

The offending plugin in my case was an older version of wp-e-commerce (which is not easily upgradeable). After finding all the files with trailing whitespace and removing it, I could now crop images in wordpress again.

Ryepup gave us a great couple of simple examples for CL-SMTP. Unfortunately when I tried to combine them to send an HTML email that had an attachment, I did not get the expected results. Instead, we insert an inappropriate ContentType header above the multipart then the message body has content type text/plain. I saw Leslie Polzer’s comment about a BKNR branch of cl-smtp that handled mime-types better. So I downloaded it, fired it up, bound the content-type variable and it almost produced the correct email. Unfortunately the result email was missing a newline after the header so my client skipped displaying this first email part (assuming it to be part of the header). I submitted a patch, that was accepted, that adds the newline after the multipart message header.

We use a MediaWiki instance at work to manage a tremendous amount of random facts. We have it setup with Sphinx FTI to get good search results and have found the wiki to be a huge help in managing our data. In fact, via a bit of reverse proxy magic, some of the notes fields in our internal billing application are chunks of a wiki page for that client with links to all of that client’s other attached wiki pages

Media Wiki Notes Field Screen Shot

We wanted the ability to interact with the wiki in a more programatic manner (such as making cancelation notes), so I started checking into the media wiki api. It gives you the ability to do almost anything you would want to do with the Media Wiki engine programatically (except I cant figure out how to get it to render wiki markup for me). I wanted a wrapper around this in Common Lisp which could take care of formulating the messages to the wiki engine and determining whether or not we succeeded preferably leaving these as just function calls to the rest of application. Because I could find no mention of a library like this elsewhere, I decided to go ahead and whip one up.

Using :cxml:drakma, & :cl-unification, I have written a very incomplete wrapper around media wiki remote api. The basic call cycle so far is as follows:

I am running a blog at tyndalls.mythinger.com as well as managing a half dozen other small blogs there. I had the request to make the upload size larger so that we could all share our digital home movies.